IMs Bryan Smith and Tegshsure Enkbhat shared first with GM Larry Kaufman at the Chesapeake Open

The 2009 Chesapeake Open (Baltimore, June 19-21) ended in a three-way tie for first at 4-1 between IM Bryan Smith, GM Larry Kaufman, and IM Tegshsure Enkhbat. Smith started out 3-0 but ended with draws against Enkhbat and Kaufman. Kaufman had a second round draw against Kevin Wang (the top rated 11-year-old in the country). Enkhbat also had a draw against Alisa Melekhina (2313), the second highest rated girl under 21 in the country. Below is a decisive 4th round game between Kaufman and IM Oladapo Adu.

It is a classic King’s Indian with Adu attacking White’s king side. Adu’s attack looked pretty strong, but afterwards Kaufman said, “The saying is that in the King’s Indian, Black cannot succeed without his queen bishop.” Kaufman calmly expanded on the queen side while defending his king.

Kaufman in his game against Adu

At the tournament about half of the players signed up to have their pairings texted to their cell phones. The feedback from the players was uniformly positive with many asking why this wasn't standard practice.

The score-based payout clearly had an effect on the draw fraction outside of the Open section. In the final round, out of 19 games that affected prizes NONE were drawn. Overall, only 14% of the games were drawn.

The only player who went 5-0 was Pennsylvania’s Jessica Regam, 12 years old, who was perfect in the under 1700 section. Jessica went into the last round with a half point lead and played against the only person with a score of 3.5. In a traditional tournament, she would only have needed a draw to secure first place. With the payouts at this tournament, a draw would only have earned her $600. Instead she played for the win and took home $1200!

Jessica Regam playing Michael Burrus

In the under 1900 section, Luis Gonzalez-Silen was 4-0 and alone in first place going into the last round but lost and fell back into a four-way tie with Matthew Freeman, Lamont Rogers, and Abiye Williams.